i ask for a mid range right wing media, and papa bear bill o'reilly gives it to me. wah?!

in my last post i asked if there was even a mid range right, or just off to the right wing media anymore.

ta-daah!

bill o'reilly, who i will not pretend is actually deserving of this new move toward the middle of the political spectrum, has said something that i can appreciate.

he recently eulogized the public healthcare option (which he claims is now officially dead) by saying this:

I want, not for personally for me, but for working Americans, to have a option, that if they don't like their health insurance, if it's too expensive, they can't afford it, if the government can cobble together a cheaper insurance policy that gives the same benefits, I see that as a plus for the folks.

dude, yes. i don't care if it isn't the socialized medicine i would love to see done, and done right, in this country. but why not this as a bipartisan solution? look out for the little guy. or for pete rose, just look out for everyone. is that such a horrible idea?

there are now 2 bills to consider, here. a bill in the house, and one in the senate, and if you thought the first bill was long, buckle up, buttercup. these two bills combine to a total of 1817 pages. looks like we have some reading to do, eh, folks?

i do have to wonder if o'reilly isn't making these statements simply because he considers the public option already dead, and he wants to pander to a larger audience, however, two posts ago i commented that to mistrust a positive move toward something desired simply based on principle, or spite is no way to make progress.

so, bill, mr o'reilly, papa bear, thanks for making sense, for once. keep up the good work and you might actually get me to watch your show, and not just find free snippets of it on the huffington post.

perhaps, somewhere, deep down, we might have a mid range, or just off to the right media, afterall.

republicans lied, and didn't do a very good job of it. who's surprised? anyone? anyone? bueller?

here's a nice short one for you all to enjoy.

remember those "tea parties" that the right wing media orchestrated?

well the tea party goers had a march on washington last weekend, and it was a big one!

or was it?

far right media (is there even any mid range right, or just off to the right media any more?) was claiming a crowd of millions.

wow! millions of people descending on washington. that must have been some big news, that i didn't even hear about until this latest story broke.

the latest story? there may have been about 70,000 people at this march, if that.

the picture they published showing a crowd spilling out of the seams of the national mall was a picture of a march from pre 2004. how do we know this? there is a building standing in the national mall right now that wasn't in the picture. a building that has been there since 2004.

what's really sad about this is that apparently in the entirety of the republican party, there isn't one person who's good enough at photoshop to cut and paste a picture of the national museum of the american indian into a photo that they are distributing internationally as proof positive that they have the numbers to bring down the obama administration.

this says to me that maybe john mccain, who admitted to being too computer illiterate to use his email account, may in fact still be the hippest member of the GOP.

how can we even take these assholes seriously?

the photo in question.

iran publishes a manifesto i can get behind. but do we have the balls to put our dick away and accept its sensibilities?

so iran has published an official offer to sit down with the US (or, if you speak farsi) and talk over a potentially lasting peaceful solution, and lay the groundwork for a long term plan of cooperation.

sounds like a success, yes?

nope.

guess who's got a problem with the offer?

yep. it's us. and what's the problem? we are hesitant to talk with them because they did not include any plans to reform and disarm their nuclear program.

what's my problem with our problem?

YES THEY DID, YOU MORONS!!

anyone who says that iran didn't explain their desire to break down their nuclear program didn't read the letter. more specifically, they did not read sections 2.5 (page4) and 2.6 (page5), in which iran offers a brief look at the intention of their nuclear program (use of clean nuclear energy in agriculture, industry and medicine and power generation), and then claims to be all for a world wide disarmament effort.

ok, so some people are going to say that we can't trust iran to hold these statements to the gauntlet of truth in action, but the point here is that they made the claims in the first place and offered them as an olive branch. why shouldn't we trust them? why should this letter be considered bullshit until proven genuine, and then let this very attitude be an insurmountable obstacle toward their chance to prove their statements true at all?

at this point if we do not accept this letter, and talk with iran, it is us who are being the big bad world power with nuclear arms and an iron clad stubbornness toward the foreign policies of other nations.

if we do not sit down with iran, because we are falsely accusing them of resisting negotiations on certain key points, then we might as well just go back to combing the desert for WMDs.

let us not forget that it is in fact us, the US, who has the most impressive and potentially devastating nuclear weapons cache. it is us who has never once offered to disarm ourselves, and it is us, and us alone, who has used those weapons against other human beings in an act of war.

i find it appalling, simply disgusting, that we insist that everyone else disarm themselves, but we do not disarm ourselves. furthermore, we are now lying about proposed disarmament negotiations made by other governments, and for what? because if we don't we might have to admit that there are other, more important bad guys to worry about? bad guys like north korea, who seem to have castrated us with nothing more than a few failed mid-range missile tests? bad guys like china, who have neutralized our concerns not only for a clean environment, but for a free tibet by making cheap toys and shoes for us by abusing their own workforce? bad guys like israel, who refuse to allow a free and independent palestine for seemingly no reason, simply because the nation of israel was partly our doing in the first place? bad guys like the american business class who steal from and lie to their own countrymen? who contract wars because otherwise there isn't much money in making SUVs that can withstand bazooka blasts, and missiles that can guide themselves across oceans and hit a target as small as an iraqi street sign, then proceed to blow up the hospital, school, and every residential home within a square mile? who put people out of their homes, and destroy their lives just to make a fraction of a penny in interest on a line of credit, a mortgage, or a loan? who outsource jobs to countries with no labor laws or regulations to save a penny per unit on a pair of shoes, or a transformer action figure? who let people die, indiscriminately to squeeze one more dollar out of them, under the guise of liability release due to preexisting conditions?

we don't have to immediately accept whatever iran sets forth in these talks, if we even accept anything at all. we don't have to make iran the hero, and we don't have to make ourselves the villain.

but if we don't accept their offer to sit down and talk this out, simply because of lies that we are spreading, then it is too late.

we have already made ourselves the villain.

i'm so international, it's ridiculous! solving the "followers" problem. a thank you letter

i have a reader in the azores! (i wonder if it's nelly furtado. if so, call me, nelly...)

aside from that reader, i also have readers in portugal, Oz, new zealand, germany, china, thailand, all over mexico, the UK, and in canada.

i am impressed. now if i could just get them to come back more often, or perhaps tell their friends...

i'll say that again, come back more often. tell your friends!

as for the "followers" problem, i am not sure why blogger/google says that the followers app/widget works the way it does, when as it turns out, it does not. so if you would like to be notified of my postings, please simply send an email to circusarbitrarius@hotmail.com, and i will put you on a list to be notified when i publish a new post. i will not send you anything else, or sell or abuse your email, the circus is, as always, not for profit, but for enlightenment. if you are already a follower, i will put you on the list immediately. so, again, if you want to be notified when i post something new, please send me an email to circusarbitrarius@hotmail. if you would like to know whenever i post anything new, like threat levels, or isms, or obits, you may let me know in the email. it's the personal touches.

thank you to all my readers, you get me closer to a more impressive grad school, and my dream of being a globe trekking, world beating, adventurer for the rest of my life. for this i appreciate and love everyone of you.

your humble circus freak,

noodles

you tweet so i won't spit in your coffee. i spit in your coffee anyway. tweet away...

recently i dropped my facebook account, and not in that ditzy, slutty way, like so many cell phones into so many night club toilets. with my past ditching of myspace, and my stand against twitter, this leaves me with no social network to speak of. i had a few asking me, "why?".

the following is not exactly the reason, as this happened, ironically, on the morning that i officially dumped fakesbook, and not at the moment i made the decision to do so.

i was reading in the news(paper. yeah, it totally still exists, i am as surprised as you are), and i don't know if i'd really call this news, but i was reading that online social networking has been evolving just fast enough to stay ahead of the proper development of social network etiquette.

it is certainly an interesting thought... that a form of socializing has been progressing so fast that we, i guess, forgot how to socialize.

i just want to grab the breaks on this story for a second, here. i should mention that the article was referring to facebooking, tweeting, texting, and pda to pda email, none of which should be considered a form of socializing. i should also mention that just above this article was an article about "how to get email in an outage", and these two articles were not in the tech or evenlifestyle sections, further distressing my hope for mankind. furthermore i would like to mention that i don't count myspace as immune to this phenomena, i had simply previously coined the phrase myspacin', as meaning: stopping everything to take a picture of yourself to prove you exist and are worthy of friends (see full definition below).

so what was the straw that broke the camel's network connection?

for the purposes of the following story (which is the purportedly true story used by the particular article in question) we will refer to the characters as midge and biff, and the baby will be a boy.

midge happened to get knocked up, and was planning on telling her friends "in person", by which she meant, sending them a picture message of her naked torso, with the symbol of the baby's sex painted on her stomach. to be fair, this is actually a pretty cool idea on midge's part. the problem is, midge happened by a party prior to breaking the news officially, and mentioned the baby's gender to biff, but also mentioned that she had not made the "official announcement" yet. at this point biff thought he had found the loophole that would allow him to make himself the center of attention for this story. biff did not tweet that "midge is having a boy!" but instead tweeted that "i just found out that midge is having a boy!"

get it?

biff didn't spill midge's beans about the bun in her oven, because he wasn't talking about midge. he was talking about himself. he heard that midge was having a boy, not midge heard that shewas having a boy. this isn't about midge's news, it's about biff's news.

consequently, because biff and midge are mutual web friends with many of the same people, including the rest of midge's short list of people who should hear the news directly from her, most of midge's closest friends heard the big news from biff, making them feel as though they had been dropped from her top8.

what just happened here that signals the end of interpersonal decorum?

in a world where we are raised to feel like we are all the center of our own little universe, we have found a way to convince ourselves that we are each actually the center of the entireuniverse.

you need to know what i'm doing right now.

your important life is less important than my important life.

but are we mature enough to admit that none of our lives is as important as facebook, twitter, myspace, et al tells us they are?

most of our lives are worth no more than a daily update for our closet loved ones, at best.

quite frankly, most (almost all) of us are entirely uninteresting until the weekend hits, and then we are only really interesting to a certain demographic of people, and probably only to a certain select group from that demographic, most of whom are probably the people we are hanging out with at the moment anyway.

if my stack of paperwork at the office is out of control, the only people who would really give a shit are the people at the office (if even them) so instead of tweeting to 1,500 people who aren't at your office, "this stack of paperwork at the office is out of control! :) lol", why not just shout, "this stack of paperwork is out of control!", that's even more direct connect than a tweet.

if the line at starbucks is taking forever, don't tweet, "ZOMG! this line at starbucks is taking forever. WTF??!" just open your mouth and say, "what the fuck? this line is taking forever!"

you know why this doesn't happen more often? because if you shouted "this stack of paperwork is out of control! lol" your responses wouldn't be in the vein of "work sux! let's go get some crantini margaritas! j/k! LOL! <3">

if you just blurted out, "what the fuck? this line is taking forever!" you wouldn't get, "starbucks on el camino? i know, it was hella long this morning. but the papaya passion-blue razzmatazz holiday melon mint croisscone is totally worth it! OMG! so good!" instead you would get a juicy wad of phlegm right between your coffee and steamed milk.

i decided to get out because i like risking soiled food to entertain a crowd (and i don't patronize starbucks anyway, so who cares?) but also because i hope that i can forge deeper relationships with those who want to play with me.

people, we are humans. we are social animals by nature. let's be social... for real, this time.

instead of sending virtual cocktails on facebook, real cocktails at the pub.

instead of tweets from hundreds, thousands of miles away, sarcastic comments to your face.

instead of "groups" "events" and "pages", real action, adventure, and real life.

this kind of behavior (that is to say, social networking) is not all bad. don't feel the need to follow me into the abyss. in fact, i think modern networking technology opens up some very interesting avenues for personal expression, such as midge's baby gender idea, and all sorts of artistic capacities. i just don't think that every single personal expression from every single person is interesting.

myspacin': (verb) photographing yourself for the sole purpose of posting it in a social networking venue.

this includes but is not limited to: the picture of yourself that you clearly took yourself (possibly with others), by reaching your hand out as far away from your body as possible, to give the impression that the picture was, in some way, someone else's idea. it also includes the picture in the mirror, which does not say, "i have friends, and i'm a good time" but instead screams, "i am so undesirable as a person, that i cannot even convince one person, one time, to take a picture of me, even as a favor. also, i am too stupid to simply use the timer on my camera, or, most times, to turn off the flash when taking a picture of a reflective surface." in addition, myspacin' includes the black and white "impromptu" picture of the man with the freshly shaven and oiled chest wearing little more than designer jeans and possibly a backwards hat, with a look on his face as if to say, "dude, bro, are you taking an artsy noir photo of me? i totally didn't know you were there. i was just in the other room, listening to maroon5, drinking michelob ultra, and busting out some military presses next to my poster of the two women kissing. that's what bithces think is hot, right? anyway, i was just in the other room, doing whatever bitches think is hot".